'Cut!!' - The Curse of the Movie Tie-In

Largely uninspired, lacklustre cash cows which are commonly bereft of any form of imagination. Movie tie-in games are often seen as the scourge of the industry by critics and gamers the world over after so many awful misfires. Hollywood is full of great characters and stories just ripe for the video game treatment, yet so many of these interpretations end up an awful mess when placed next to standalone titles.

Frustratingly, some superb franchises that should have made an excellent game have ended up an embarrassment. With so much great source material literally handed to developers on a golden plate, you would be forgiven for thinking something was rotten in film-game land. Why then, do so many of these titles fail to hit the mark?

Part of a games appeal is that they offer developers the chance to create fantastic new worlds from the ground up, rich in lore and unique characters. On the other hand, movie interpretations can be restricted by scripts, the characters portrayed in the story and the film's running time. Treyarch's Quantum of Solace tie-in is a fine example of this.

The movie itself was under two hours long, had a few neat action sequences and a complex plot. To the surprise of many, the game ended up being one of the few film titles that slipped through the net and ended up being not bad. However, after the second mission, the stages led you through the plot of the previous film Casino Royale, with Bond engaging in full-blown shootouts on the roof of a train, a museum and in the casino itself.

If you've seen either film, you know that neither featured these scenes, but making a game tie-in long enough to justify your hard-earned £40 is another problem developers face and often, this is made possible by silly amounts of padding. So, you can't have a game that follows the plot too closely, just as you can't have it deriving too much from the original license, which in itself is a recipe for confusing half-assedness.

However, some titles break the confines intentionally, elaborating on the film, allowing the developer to put their own spin on the experience and Spider-Man 2 is perhaps one of the best examples of this. If you still have a last-gen console, such as the PS2 or original Xbox, it's definitely worth seeking out.

What Activision did differently was make the game appealing to the core Spider-Man fan base - the comic book readers. By adding in a host of cameos from the Marvel universe and giving you a massive interpretation of New York to swing around to your heart's content, the developer was on to a winner. Standing on top of the Empire State building, freefalling a few hundred feet then swinging downtown with your webbing was a joy and all the dodgy pizza-delivery missions in the world couldn't water down the fun.

Here's a bit of gaming trivia for you: In 1982, Atari released E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial, based on the hugely popular Steven Spielberg movie of the same name and one of the first movie to game crossovers ever made. The game would go on to trigger the beginning of the end for the developer and is often cited as the catalyst for the now legendary video game market crash of 1983.

So what the hell went wrong? While the film was insanely popular and would go on to earn worldwide appeal, even today. The game, however, was a horrible mess, bearing no resemblance to the film. Those who commissioned the game wanted Atari to finish it in three months, just in time for Christmas, which was an unreasonable deadline even by eighties standards. The same people were so sure of the game's success off the back of the movie that they ordered a silly amount of copies, not aware of how rushed and horrible the final product would be.

Needless to say, the game sold terribly, with millions of unsold copies being crushed up into tiny pieces, dumped in a New Mexico landfill and buried in cement. Google the story if you want a laugh, but the fact remains, this air of apathy seemed  destined to follow film games forever.

With expectations set so low, it's nice to be genuinely surprised by a film game every now and then. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, from the brilliant developer Starbreeze is easily one of the best on any format, so good in fact, that a sequel, including a reworked version of the original, is coming to PS3 and Xbox 360 this year in the form of Escape from Dark Athena. Its perfect blend of first-person shooting and third-person platforming is a winning combination.

Add to that list the much-anticipated Ghostbusters game, Vin Diesel's free roaming driving and shooting fest The Wheelman, an episodic Watchmen title, the apparently excellent gun porn title Wanted: Weapons of Fate from the outstanding developer Grin and many more. 2009 could just be the year that breaks the curse and restores film games to excellence.